differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or
peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The
contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely
to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of
its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English
history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.]

In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great
difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the
coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose
areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square
kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size
from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the
Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square
kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square
kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern
Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square
kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square
kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,000 square
kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western
Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium,
Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the
stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of
peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in
geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The
three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean
are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization
rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of
Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and
self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence
approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more
productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller
than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government
"the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical
Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant
of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. T